THE WEB OF ISLAND LIFE 179 



and of the velocity of the wind and found as much variation as 

 two hours between slack days and times of semi-gale. The 

 humans, too, were affected by the wind. When the saltponds 

 near the settlement were reopened ten years later I recall the 

 exasperation of the operators when the wind went unaccount- 

 ably slack for an unusual period; with no wind there was no 

 evaporation of brine, hence no salt, reduced earnings and no 

 work for the laborers, unrest and discontent. The scorching 

 sun was not enough to evaporate the sea water; without the 

 wind the entire economy of the island was disrupted. 



These were the more obvious evidences; Inagua itself was 

 wind-created, born like the dunes out of the sea. It would not 

 be altogether an untruth, nor an overstatement, to say that 

 hummingbirds exist on Inagua because over the American 

 mainland, in Central America, in Colombia and in Venezuela 

 great columns of hot air are arising, creating a vast semi-vacuum 

 as they mount skywards which the trades rush in to fill; nor to 

 declare that the cactus blooms from which these hummingbirds 

 glean their meals of nectar and insects have their being because 

 a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago the wind picked 

 up newly dried fragments of surf -ground dead sea creatures and 

 whirled them into the air to place them within reach of the 

 fresh warm rain. Sea and clouds, wind and hot sun, the bodies 

 of tiny f oraminif era, living coralines, drifted barren sand dunes, 

 a tinge of green vegetation, flower blooms, blossom-dwelling in- 

 sects, insect-feeding hummingbirds; these are a chain of events, 

 a mesh of existence, a transportation of inanimate and animate, 

 a death for a life, a fiber of existence beginning with the wind. 



The cycle of birth and death was nearly complete at Babylon. 

 Life had come and gone. Snails and palms and hummingbirds, 

 grasses and seeds had their brief hour and had been cast aside by 

 the breeze to be buried and dissolved. The same wind that 

 brought the dunes into existence was etching away the solid 



